Principal / Staff+ Engineer - Agentic AI (San Francisco)
Looking for experienced builders only. Join a small, elite, execution-focused team and personally own an entire technical domain at an AI-native fintech pushing agentic AI into one of the highest-stakes industries.
Comp: $330K–$380K+ base + competitive equity
Stack: Python, Node.js, React, Frontier AI Tools
This role is primarily on-site in San Francisco (3-5 days/week), with remote flexibility for exceptional candidates.
🛠️ You will:
- Own architecture and engineering for an entire technical domain.
- Architect, build, and ship production AI systems alongside your team.
- Lead a pod through technical credibility while remaining deeply hands-on with code.
- Build AI agents across voice, chat, retrieval, evaluation, and computer use.
- Own the technical bar for quality, reliability, and velocity.
- Partner with Product as an equal owner of outcomes.
- Use Claude Code, Cursor, and frontier models as part of the daily engineering workflow.
🧩 100% Required:
- Staff or Principal-level Software Engineer with 6–14 years of experience.
- Experience scaling with an early-stage startup (Series A–C).
- Owned a critical system or product end-to-end from 0→1.
- Strong distributed systems and software architecture fundamentals.
- Deep, daily use of frontier AI tools such as Claude and Cursor.
- Strong hands-on engineering skills, ideally across Python, Node.js, and React.
- Comfortable leading technically without moving into pure management.
🪶 Other Skills:
- Hands-on technical founder experience.
- Conversational AI, voice AI, or agentic systems experience.
- Experience building production LLM or AI systems.
- BS/BA in Computer Science or a related technical field.
- MS or PhD in a related technical field.
- Experience building high-scale fintech or financial infrastructure.
🧬 How The Company Works
- AI-native – frontier AI tools are part of the standard engineering workflow.
- Hands-on – senior technical leaders still architect, code, review, and ship.
- High ownership – own an entire domain rather than a narrow piece of a system.
- Small senior team – engineering is organized into high-leverage pods.
- Production-focused – real AI products serving 100+ financial institutions.
- Early-stage impact – Series A and already cash-flow positive.